Absent Fever: One Year Anniversary

(Artwork by Beth Hoeckel)

The footprints and fingerprints of the incongruous crew are suspended in the everywhere; from the mosaic crumblings of the many moons to the sand rink deserts, the metal city speed to the diamond glaciers of the heaven reachers, their trail has tracked further than they could tell you. In now a single year of musical voyage, Absent Fever has released 98 songs, 14 collections of sound, and has worked with 10 artists. In a single year of existence, Absent Fever has come to build creations with our most admired musicians, and collaborate with our most beloved artists and friends. Take a tour of our travels with this 10 song compilation, which features our favorite song from each artist we’ve had the fortune of working with. Allow this tour to not only be a tour of Absent Fever, but depths of this musical sphere we’re all a part of. 

Thank you to the musicians who have allowed us to be involved with the making of our most beloved sounds, to the visual artists and creators who have made such beloved sounds come to life, to the bloggers and communities who have shared them, and to the listeners who have experienced this voyage with us. Our travels are not yet over - much more is to come of Absent Fever, and this year merely marks the first of many. 

Embark on your tour:

Download here. Stream below:

Generation y Not

Below is the very first post I did for the newly launched DIT blog collective PORTALS that I’ll be contributing to :::

Punk bands like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Television, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and heaps more pursued the conviction that “if nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed”. Punk culture of the 80’s was the teenager opposed to the bourgeois - it was the outcasts and the isolated, the vicious and frustrated, the protective of their youth. Each youth generation opposes mediocrity; mediocrity is the explicit opposite of adolescent sentiments. While teenagers, like myself, are experiencing the affliction of discovering their identities, the pressures of conformity, and the trouble of expectations, a society of mediocrity feels fictitious. If the youth of the 80’s popularized the opposition to the bourgeois, I wonder what the youth of the present is repelling. 

Youth will always be defiant of the adulthood they are expected to enter; but there’s a hugely significant difference in the vocalization of that defiance today. The distinction is the identical vocal opportunity of the present. If I’m 16 and my blog has the same readership contingency as anyone’s, then what implication does that have on the 16-year-old musician? The most prevalent bearing of that opportunity is in resources. The 16-year-old musician has the equivalent music production opportunities as his seniors on a fundamental level. This makes debatably the most colossal impact on the beat scene. An immense amount of what’s blogged about on sites akin to PORTALS is sample-based, and in synchronicity with that, teenagers make an apparent portion of the music blogged about. In my mind, that doesn’t seem aberrant in the least bit. To me, it feels conspicuous – but only because I was born into the generation of the accessible. 

The idea of youth having the same volume of expression as adults is hastily becoming less and less an exception to the norm. Less and less are we identified as young and held within the connotation that we’re the atypical of the teens. Industries fetishizing youth and using age as a marketing tool is becoming less rampant in the music world – and more so in the blogging community where artists are discovered in the open playing field of the Internet. And so if the voice of youth is becoming more and more received, I wonder if the youth of today is repelling mediocrity or if we’re becoming that commonality. This idea of becoming what you’re contrary to is something that bands like Nirvana spoke of. Kurt Cobain said that the mass recognition Nirvana received in the consumerist world was unequivocally what they contested. I wouldn’t say though that the prospect of adolescents and adults being comparable in the music world is carried with such a negative connotation. I’d say that it’s an inevitable fate.

 Because of the technology operated sphere my generation was carried into, it would be unfeasible for youth today not to have the inclination to share themselves on the internet. If young artists were not blogged about, it would be obvious that those who steer the music community were deliberately disregarding a group that compensates for a vast portion of music. I think that the larger music sites are just now beginning to honestly ratify young artists. While smaller sites tend to cover younger artists more frequently, likely because they’re less steered by those of the industry. The influx of youth involved in music is immense, and no longer solely as the consumer, but furthermore as the creator. The question now is what qualifies the legitimacy of music? My response would be that nothing qualifies validity; the validity in music is as unrestricted as its distributor, the Internet. 

Below are 3 tracks by 3 artists who have been born into a generation parented by the internet:

Honeydrip - “I Know” (click the link to listen)

Caves - “1993” (click the link to listen)

XXYYXX - “Never Leave” (click the link to listen)